Professor Martin Marty’s full comment on Trinity United’s former pastor can be found here.

And just who the heck is Martin Marty?

Andrew Sullivan writes that he knows “of few more distinguished, principled or decent public figures.”

Hillary Clinton had almost won my respect in the last week for not jumping directly into the Jeremiah Wright debate. So much for that, according to RCP.

UPDATE: Steve Benen offers some thoughts on this development, concluding:

… we now have a situation in which John McCain defended Obama against Wright-related charges, and Mike Huckabee defended Obama, but Hillary Clinton sat down with editors of a conservative newspaper to reignite a fire that had already largely gone out.

Less than a week ago, former Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel said, “Many liberals like myself, who would be happy to support Hillary Clinton if she earned the nomination, would abandon her if her campaign seeks to exploit the Wright controversy either in the remaining contests or with superdelegates.”

Now, it appears she’s doing both. I’d hoped Clinton was above this.

I respect Hillary Clinton as one of the most capable First Ladies in US history. She failed in some of her signature efforts, including especially health care reform, but she persisted in offering substantive advice on policy matters. She was no Laura Bush.

But throughout this campaign Hillary Clinton has gone very close to the sin of resume-padding: making her White House experience more than it really was. The release of her First Lady calender offers mixed results on her claims to major policy experience in the White House. Her claims on Northern Ireland are mildly exaggerated, but seem significant nonetheless. Her assertions about NAFTA seem completely confused, but I have no idea what to make of it in total.

However, the one issue that seems to be most exaggerated is her claims about her 1996 trip to Bosnia. She has offered that trip as an example of her courage and ability to literally show poise under fire. It’s a pretty harrowing tale with references to sniper fire and corkscrew maneuvers. But it’s probably not true. Comedian Sinbad already called her out on it, saying the trip was as routine as you can get. She responded by offering more detail about running from the plane with heads covered and a greeting ceremony canceled. She was doubling down.

And now she has gone bust. Video of her Bosnia trip has surfaced and it shows a decidedly different picture of the Tuzla trip. Watch the video below and you’ll see: there was no sniper fire. She made that part up. And she got caught on video.

Frankly, I think this is a killer for her campaign. It isn’t complicated and it isn’t just controversial. It’s just so embarrassingly and insultingly wrong. This is just a lie that she thought wouldn’t get reported. If - and when - the mainstream media pushes this prevarication with the video, she will face enormous pressure to correct herself. This was her only trip to Bosnia, and this video came from that trip. Who are we going to believe: Hillary Clinton or our lying eyes?

The reason this is so bad for her is timing. If this had come out last year nobody would notice. There’d be a few late night comedian jokes about it, but then it would fall down the memory hole. But today she is trying to make a desperate case for why her candidacy is still viable. With no Florida or Michigan revote, she would need an historic stomping of Obama in ALL remaining states to take the pledged delegate lead OR the popular vote lead.

The Wright controversy could have been the opportunity she needed to pull Obama down, but Obama handled it with such class that he may have actually benefited from it over the long term; he confronted the issue long before the fall and he delivered a historic speech on race that clearly impressed many arch-conservatives like Charles Murray, Christopher Caldwell, Jack Kemp and Peggy Noonan. Polling shows he recovered from the Wright issue quite well too.

So now Hillary Clinton is left needing a perfect campaign and more bad news for Obama. What she could not afford was an embarrassing revelation about resume-padding that will certainly get mocked by late night comedians and even journalists. She couldn’t afford a massive error like this at this time. It conjured up the claims of serial exaggeration by Al Gore and even John Kerry. It made her look fake, and her claims to executive experience and crisis readiness look fraudulent. I don’t think she can recover from this.

Some things should make everyone laugh like the picture of a puppy & kitten locked in an embrace/fight/whatever they’re actually doing.

Some things aren’t as funny to certain people as it is to others. Try race. One of the reasons I think race is still such a big issue in America is because a lot of people lack a sense of humor. Look, people like to laugh and, for some, safe stuff just isn’t that funny. We like to laugh at things that straddle the line and sometimes we like to laugh at things that cross the line. While I see some people get so upset over Obama’s statement about his grandma, some of us just laugh because we all have a nana or uncle who is kind of racist and/or crazy, but we still love them despite disagreeing with 90% of what they say or believe. A lot of us actually think they’re the funniest person in our whole family.

People like us think this blog, Stuff White People Like, created by white people, is actually pretty funny. The ability to laugh at yourself is actually a good thing as is the ability to laugh with each other about all of us. Black people do it all the time. Check out any black issues blog and you’ll see what I mean. The comments section will include a lot of joking with the ocassional comment that this is racist, isn’t funny, how can you say that about your own people, yada yada yada. We ignore those people.

Some of the “Stuff White People Like” - Expensive Sandwiches, Having Gay Friends, Sushi, Outdoor Performance Clothes, Bottles of Water, Musical Comedy. “Being Near Water” is my favorite because I love that more than anything short of Jesus. I guess I got that from my Irish grandmother. That was a joke. Okay, so some people got upset with the post titled “Asian Women,” but none of this is mean-spirited and its sarcastically poking fun at generalizations.

“Dean Rader, a pop culture critic who authors weeklyrader.blogspot.com, says readers flock to Stuff White People Like because it’s hip and hot and the place to be seen and heard online. ‘It’s just as much about class and coolness and yuppiness and consumption (as race).’ And yes, if the some of the posts push far beyond the boundaries of good taste, readers seem to find liberation in an environment unfettered by political correctness.”

Other sites like The Assimilated Negro or The Angry Asian do the same thing and most people find them very entertaining. The only mean-spirited aspect is in the minority of comments. But now, Stuff White People Like has become so popular that mainstream media is picking up on it and will do what they always do; mess everything up by blowing it out of proportion and analyzing it to death. This comic site will now become controversial, offensive and will likely get labeled as an instigator in our country’s quarrel over race. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

From Blog To Riches? The Stuff of White People - washingtonpost.com
Race-related blog drawing white-hot reactions - Chron.com

The continuously played sermons from Jeremiah Wright have rightly shocked much of the nation. But given the stature he’s held in theological circles - both among blacks and whites - I figured there was something more to him than these clips. Surely other sermons would be less controversial, if we could only have access to the other DVDs.

Well, it turns out that the other portions of the controversial, often-played clips themselves have a context that we haven’t yet seen yet. It’s called: what did Wright say before and after the incendiary remarks played over and over? Finally, some brave souls who attend and defend Trinity United Church of Christ have posted lengthy You Tube clips of two of the controversial sermons that provide context for the incendiary snipets.

For the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” clip, see the fuller version here.

For the “God Damn America” clip, see the fuller version here.

The sermons are, indeed, controversial. And they are, indeed, fiery. They also do, in fact, condemn the actions of the American government and American culture over time. But they are far less incendiary and “anti-American” when seen in full.

Do yourself a favor and see what the media is hiding.

I know I’m a one-subject pony of late, and for that, I apologize. But this subject’s important to many of us; and should be important to all of us. Besides, I couldn’t pass up sharing this excerpt from Katherine at Obsidian Wings:

A lot of people say there is nothing that Obama can do or say that can excuse his association with a black man who would say those things. Never mind whether Obama was there. Never mind when Obama found out about them. Never mind whether they’re typical of Wright’s sermons — the media cannot be bothered to explore that question at all. Never mind that Obama specifically denounced those remarks, repeatedly. Never mind that Obama obviously doesn’t share those views. Never mind that there is absolutely no evidence in his entire public record that he hates America or hates white people, or that he has ever pandered to those sentiments. He is guilty of fraternizing with an angry, scary black man; he is therefore unfit for the presidency.

The larger post from which that passage was lifted is also an excellent read, if you have the time.

Nearly twenty years ago, then-Ohio Governor Dick Celeste went to Iowa, exploring the possibility of making a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. One of Celeste’s hosts while there was a transplanted Ohioan, a Methodist pastor. During that stay, a wire reporter asked Celeste about reports that he’d stepped out on his wife. The pastor-host told the reporter that if he were Celeste, he’d simply say, “It’s none of your business.”

I thought of that advice as I read that the newly-inaugurated governor of New York, David Paterson, and his wife, Michelle, went before the media on Tuesday in order to confess that each of them, in the past, have had extramarital affairs. It was apparently a matter of the Patersons wanting to get out in front of a story they must have feared could bring the governor down.

That may be understandable, but it’s lamentable.

There were good reasons for Paterson’s predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, to get in hot water for his extramarital affairs. In fact, I count at least two of them:

Spitzer’s patronage of prostitutes was illegal and abetted illegal behavior.

His reckless expenditure of $80,000 on prostitutes called his judgment into question.

Spitzer’s behavior objectified women. Prostitution is not, as some insist, a “victimless crime.” Prostitutes, very often the victims of sexual abuse as girls, are used by their “johns.” No matter how self-assured prostitutes may seem, there is nothing consensual Read the rest of this entry »

I will eventually publish a second part to the series I started here. But that second installment requires some research, and time for said research is scarce right now. In the meantime — in addition to my prior fondness for Roger L. Simon’s confession from the right — I discovered this morning a counterbalance confession from the left, by David Mamet. An excerpt:

… I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

There’s much more to the essay than that, so please, read the whole thing — or, consider Paul Silver’s take on the essay (and additional excerpts from it) here.

It’s definitely not a good week for NY Democrats. In case you missed this non-Spitzer story, see here for the basics. And, for the Obama campaign response, see here. Will HRC respond in kind?

Senator Barack Obama’s convincing victory in the Wyoming caucuses is noteworthy for several reasons.

It’s one of the first western caucus states that Senator Hillary Clinton vigorously sought. She, Bill and Chelsea toured much of the state, and actually got there before Obama did. The demographics favored Obama, but without any polling there, nobody could assume that Obama would win so comfortably there again.

The win came after some narrow but significant losses in Ohio, Rhode Island and the primary portion of Texas. And it came after the worse press Obama has received up to now. The 61-38 victory - while not enough for the 8th pledged delegate (he needed 63% and Hillary’s campaigning may have saved her that delegate) - was in line with Obama’s pre-March 4th performance. Barack Obama has clearly regained whatever momentum he lost on March 4.

But a more important story was a special election held in the Illinois 14th Congressional District. This was Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s old district, which he gave up for some lucrative post-Congress career. In the primary, two intriguing characters emerged. The Democrat, Bill Foster, was a nuclear physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Lab. The Republican, Jim Oberweis, was a dairy magnate who had run for Governor and Senator before and lost in primaries. Neither were establishment candidates within their parties.

The Illinois 14th has been Republican as long as anybody remembers. Ronald Reagan was born in this district - Dixon - and the major highway that runs through it - Interstate 88 - is named Ronald Reagan Highway (I know there are other Ronald Reagan Highways, but this one was the first and the biggest I believe). This was a classic Chicago collar county district that gave rise to Barry Goldwater in 1964 and bolstered Ronald Reagan in 1980. This is also my father-in-law’s district, and his extremely right-wing political views seem to fit in quite nicely there.
Read the rest of this entry »

Logan, county seat of Hocking County, Ohio, the rural wonderland that sits about fifty-minutes southeast of Columbus, wasn’t as hard-hit as the capital city has been by the snow storm of the past twenty-four hours. But we’ve been under a Level 3 alert, meaning that only emergency vehicles could be on the roads.

In Columbus, over 20-inches of snow fell. Here, we got about half that. I spoke with my dad, who lives in Columbus, little more than an hour ago, and he says that, at this point, he can’t even really open the door of his house. Fortunately, he and mom are stocked up.
Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers know I’m an Andrew Sullivan fan. But I have to respectfully disagree with him on this argument. Among other things, he writes:

If the Clintons beat Obama this way, I have a simple prediction. It will mean a mass flight from the process. It will alter the political consciousness of an entire generation of young voters - against any positive interaction with the political process for the foreseeable future.

My response, emailed to him a few minutes ago:

Please. If the Clintons beat Obama this way, there’s no one to blame but us, we the people, we the voters. If an entire generation lets the Clintons turn them off from politics then I guess those ‘Yes we can’ chants were nothing but empty rhetoric after all. The facts of the matter are relatively simple: If we want a different kind of politics, if we truly believe ‘yes we can,’ then we better start acting like it. Mud-slinging won’t stop until mud-slinging is proven ineffective. And the only viable proof is this: For the buyers to refuse the sale.

As I work on the next installments to my “None of the Above” series — the first was published yesterday — this essay by Roger L. Simon caught my eye. It deserves a full read, though the following passages struck me as the most familiar and (perhaps) comforting to folks like me who refuse to stand firm on the ground of any so-called ideology.

No wonder, like Linus clinging to his blanket, we cleave to these very old, conventional and often sclerotic viewpoints more than we should—even though [they] tend to blind us to the world in front of us and deny us the freedom to find a solution outside our little frames. Unconventional ideas become more threatening than they should because they don’t fit our received schema …

We all engage in the creation and disputation of ideologies. But if we let them always govern us, we are not free. We lose our mental flexibility and waste a great deal of time proving we are right (correct in our ideology) and that our adversaries are nitwits. We also decrease the likelihood of intelligent compromise and progress.

… I regard whatever paltry knowledge, whatever theories I have picked up or adopted in my life like arrows in a quiver. Most days I might be pulling the same arrow, but some days, when the prey changes, when the target shifts, as sometimes it does, I might pull a totally different arrow. I could be a capitalist for three weeks, but a Marxist for the fourth, a Freudian one day and a Zen Buddhist the next, a free trader for years and even — once in a while … — a protectionist. But most of all I want to be free to contradict myself and to be wrong, because I am not always right. And when I look for a President, I look for someone with the same capacity.

I wrote here last night about my perception that John McCain’s campaign as the presidential nominee of the Republican party was starting off on the wrong foot.

Emblematic of that to me was McCain’s decision to tear to Washington to receive a personal endorsement from George W. Bush today.

Mind you, I would expect nothing other than the sitting Republican president to Read the rest of this entry »

I received a mass-email from the Obama campaign about three hours ago, but did not have a chance to post on it until now; subject line was simply “The math.” From the intro, leading up to the inevitable money ask:

Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday’s elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.

That’s a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted.

For comparison, that’s less than half our net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It’s also less than our net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it’s considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.

They failed.

It’s clear, though, that Senator Clinton wants to continue an increasingly desperate, increasingly negative — and increasingly expensive — campaign to tear us down.

That’s her decision. But it’s not stopping John McCain, who clinched the Republican nomination last night, from going on the offensive. He’s already made news attacking Barack, and that will only become more frequent in the coming days.

Right now, it’s essential for every single supporter of Barack Obama to step up and help fight this two-front battle. In the face of attacks from Hillary Clinton and John McCain, we need to be ready to take them on.

Of course, that’s just the BHO campaign’s account, and as Justin Gardner points out, it’s not all that cut-and-dried.

Still — whether “the math” is from Obama’s people or a presumably objective source like David Kurtz at TPM — the base conclusion is the same: HRC didn’t gain much at all last night, numbers-wise.

On the other hand — as commentators here and elsewhere have already pointed out — the combination of (a) the psychological lift of HRC’s victories last night, plus (b) her campaign’s discovery (at long last) of which (admittedly negative) messages actually work against BHO … those factors may ultimately be far more important in the final outcome of this never-ending race than raw numbers ever could be.

At this point, I almost wish we could pull a communal Rip-van-Winkle, sleep until August, and then have someone wake us up and tell us what happened.

To take a break from the election overload, here is an idea for a kid’s climbing toy that caught my eye over at Gizmodo.

Anyone who allows their children to play on this should probably be visited by the department of child & family services. I’m a full-grown adult and I can see myself being gravely injured by this thing. I’m not against climbers. Studies actually show that they are great confidence builders in young girls and can help keep our kids from becoming fat asses like us, but this thing is slippery. Also, having 10,000 kids on it at the same time is only inviting chaos and dismemberment. It’s not all bad. At least they have a nice bed of hard sharp greyish-blue rocks they can fall onto if things don’t work out at the top.

I just received a very distressed phone call from someone running errands this morning in NE Ohio. His first words were, “Someone is making a lot of money.” He went on to say that,

It’s one political ad after another on the radio - even 107! Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones hawking this one, Barack Obama telling us about hope in the other one - it’s insane and it’s not even Tuesday yet!

I received four or five phone calls yesterday, and Friday night, during Shabbat, after I’d received two or three afternoon calls, from live and robovoices, I made my son pick up the phone (wouldn’t you know it was a person I actually needed to talk to?).

My favorite ones so far: Cuyahoga County Judge Stuart Friedman’s robocall. I’m paraphrasing:

Hi. This is Judge Stuart Friedman. I know. You hate these calls. And I really hate these calls.

Judge Friedman has been a judge for at least 18 years, because when I was clerking during the summer of 1990, while in law school, he was on the bench. And he says his spiel with such real-toned exhaustion. I hung up on him, but I was laughing in a goodhearted way. (Hmm - just looked at his picture - might be a different Stuart Friedman than one I remember.)

Then, there was the call yesterday where they tell me to “push 1″ if I’m a woman and “push 2″ if I’m a man. You know which one I pushed? Yup - 2. And the call says a couple of things about voting and hangs up on me! Anyone guess who paid for that call? It starts out saying it’s some analytics group.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better and I’m rounding up a big batch of posts and news and polls to prove it. Stay tuned.

Shout out to Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island - is it like this there too?

One of the things that’s bothered me a great deal in this primary campaign is the hesitancy with which many Jews have approached Barack Obama’s candidacy. I think it is rooted, first and foremost,, in steadfast support for Hillary Clinton among the Jewish community. I completely respect that relationship and I myself have always admired her. But I also think there are some in the Jewish community who believe some of the more inflammatory rumors spread about Barack Obama’s identity and his politics. To their credit, leaders of all major Jewish organizations - from Orthodox to Reconstructionist - have condemned these mostly email-based rumors circulating throughout the Jewish community the last several months. But today Barack Obama got to sit down and answer a series of nagging questions that some Jewish Clevelanders have, including on Israel, terrorism, Louis Farrakhan and other “less controversial” issues.

The New York Sun has a full transcript of the session and you can link to it here.

A couple interesting snippets.

About Israel:

These changes are founded in a view of the world that I believe is deeply imbedded in the Jewish tradition. That all of us have a responsibility to do our part to repair the world. That we can take care of one another and build strong communities grounded in faith and family. That repairing the world is a task that each of us is called upon to take up every single day. That is the spirit that I expect to take with me to the White House. As Robert said I will also carry with me an unshakable commitment to the security of Israel and the friendship between the United States and Israel.
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This weekend, I missed the return of Saturday Night Live, but have heard from several sources that it was the best episode in recent memory, starting with the opening skit, this faux debate between Clinton and Obama. Priceless.

President Pervez Musharraf has told Jemima Khan in an interview published in the British daily The Independent that: “My role as a president is simply the checks and balances, the seatbelts… a sort of father figure to the prime minister, but I won’t have to see him for weeks.” Jemima is the ex-wife of Pakistani politician/famous cricketer Imran Khan.

“Talking peace, Musharraf said he would work with ‘everyone’, asserting that the country must move from the current politics of confrontation to a policy of reconciliation.” In the Indian subcontinent they would say: “Sau chuhe khaake billi Haj ko chali” (After feasting on hundreds of mice the cat embarks on a pilgrimage.)

Agencies report that the polling was largely peaceful in most parts of the country, barring minor incidents of clashes among the supporters of contesting parties, according to Pakistan’s Election Commission officials.

Over 81 million voters were eligible to take part in the polling in Pakistan’s four provinces of Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and seven restive tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan to choose 272 members of the National Assembly or lower house of Parliament and 728 members of provincial assemblies for a five-year term.

More here…